The Dream Tenderer

The Sophia Foundation, a San Francisco-area charitable organization, will auction off home appliances owned by Jerry Garcia this holiday season. (Oh, sorry Bill O'Reilly, I know I'm not supposed to use the secular term "holiday season"...This joyous anniversary of the divine birth of our savoir, the Lamb of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, praise be to his name.)

The group's chariman, a massive Deadhead named Henry Kotlys, bought Garcia's home in Nicasio, CA two years after Jerry died of a heart attack. It's all explained in this handy Yahoo! article.

Included in the auction will be the Nicasio home's original furniture, electrical appliances, the dishwasher and even toilets! Just think...you could one day keep a cold pint of Cherry Garcia in the same freezer where Jerry Garcia used to keep his massive oversized bottles of vodka and back-up reserve liquid cocaine stash.

Oh, but I kid...Like Kotlys, I'm a big fan of the Dead myself, inspired mainly by my father, whose love for the group has extended even to his Jerry Garcia Blogger avatar. As silly as it sounds for people to bid thousands of dollars on items that belonged to Jerry Garcia for 3 years at the end of his life, I still think this auction will be a big success. The guy just meant a whole lot, emotionally, to a whole lot of people. They grew up feeling a kinship with this man, and would appreciate greatly a chance to feel a little bit closer to him.

Kotlys had the items appraised for a grand total of $75,000, but I agree with him that it will bring in more than that. If I had the money, I would love to get my dad Jerry Garcia's powder room shitter for Hannukah. Nothing says "thanks for giving me your ceaseless unconditional love and support" like the gift of a dead rock singer's commode.

Having said all that, the actual charity The Sophia Foundation sounds a bit questionable. This AP article says that it's "a San Francisco Bay area nonprofit that aids children and families during marital separations and divorce." Meh? Supports children during marital separations? I mean, if it were helping children being raised in foster homes, then I would think it's a completely 100% worthy cause. But that doesn't even say it aids disadvantaged children during divorce. Just children. I mean, yeah, parents splitting up is psychologically hard for a kid to deal with. But a whole charity just to give them "aid"? What is that, like counselling? If a rich kid's parents are breaking up and he needs counseling, shouldn't the breaking-up parents deal with that expense? Do we really need a Foundation?

It gets weirder. The Sophia Foundation's Mission statement can be found on its website. It's dedicated to "helping families in transition" and "promoting the arts and consciousness of the arts." Huh? Are those two connected at all? And isn't that a pretty huge mission for one little Bay Area charitable foundation? Who's behind this thing, anyway?

[NOTE: After writing these two paragraphs, I got frightened for a moment that The Sophia Foundation was set up by some guy to mourn the death of his wife or baby girl Sophia, and that I'd feel like a real asshole making fun of his effort to turn a horrible personal tragedy into something meaningful through good works. But that's not the case, so I get to keep making fun. Sweet.]

Here's what you find when you click on HISTORY:

The Sophia Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, was founded by Cassandra Light in 1994. Cassandra is a world-renowned healer, sculptor, and therapist, specializing in depth psychology, mythology, and dreamtending.

Dreamtending? Doesn't everyone tend to dream at night? (True science answer: Yes) What the hell is dreamtending? Is it like dreamcatching? If it means tending to your...um...personal needs...while you're sleeping, then I think most guys do it, at least through their adolescent years.

For answers, I turn your attention to DreamTending.com, the home site for the world's foremost tender of dreams, Dr. Stephen Aizenstat.

I read a whole bunch of stuff on Aizenstat's Dreamtending website, but he staunchly refuses to come clean on what exactly the word means. All I was able to discover was that it's a way of experiencing your dreams that will apparently help you feel better about your everyday life.

The website has a lot of multimedia presentations that explain the basic principles of dreamtending, but not if and how it's different from interpreting dreams in old-school Freudian style. I'm of the opinion that dreams are just mash-ups of everything we experienced in real life recently, in which some concepts we only think about vaguely in the back of our minds can take greater sway over our psyches. So, for example, if you went clothes shopping one day with a friend you've always kind of disliked, you might dream that night you're choking them to death with the tie your dad wore to work every day when you were 9.

I think dreamtending is supposed to be done when you're awake, but again, I couldn't figre that out from the website because it's so crammed full of New Age dumbass wankery. Look at this horseshit:

Perhaps now, more than ever, we are asked to remember the eternal wound ofthe mythic Centaur Chiron, the divine physician, or Asklepios, hisstudent, the Wounded Healer and practitioner who is conveyer between thetwo worlds. Both are patrons to those who follow the healing ways of thedream. It is from their pathos, their suffering, that they recover thatwhich is required for healing. Deep in the wound comes the knowledge thatthe medicines of the soul are found in the complexity of the eternalmoment, not in the salvation or redemption of the one-sided and virtuous.

Wait...I thought this post was about Jerry Garcia's toilets! I have gotten way off track here. But I just can't believe what I'm reading! This is actually kind of upsetting. Jerry's worldly possessions are being sold off by some nutbag in charge of a charitable organization set up by some other nutbag to do something unclear like tending to the dreams of kids from broken homes.

Seriously, this dreamtending thing sounds like a lot of cultish nonsense to my ears. And it's a moneymaking scheme for this guy Aizenstat as well. He sells a six-tape series of instructional tapes on how to tend your dreams through wacko New Age online catalogues with names like "Tools for Wellness." Because that has a better sound than their original, more honest title: "Wellness for Tools."

Seriously, on the front page of the Wellness for Tools catalogue, they have something called a Zen Alarm Clock. Having an alarm clock isn't "zen," you idiot! The whole concept of being "zen" is removing yourself from the ludicrous artificiality of the physical world and attempting to commune with the infinite. Setting a machine to beep to alert you of the time, so you can get up, shower and drive across town to serve your faceless corporate masters for a weekly paycheck is the exact opposite of being Zen.

And what's with that last name? Aizenstat. Sounds like the location of a concentration camp or something. "6,000 Polish Jews were shipped to Aizenstat in the winter of 1943, before the Nazis realized it was not, in fact, a concentration camp, but instead a popular beer garden. All the prisoners survived, but most gained at least 40 pounds, developed slurred speech and were unable to remove the smell of malted hopps from their clothes or personal possessions."

So, okay, back to the history of the Sophia Foundation:

From 1994 until 2003, Attorney Richard Glantz lead Sophia as its chairman and legal counsel. In 2005, Attorney Henry Koltys assumed leadership of Sophia, as chairman and legal counsel, expanding its purpose to include children and families in transition.

So now the group is managed by this guy, Koltys, who wants to help children of divorce. Fair enough, I guess. But what are their plans for the money they will make from this auction? How specifically will they help these kids in need (or even be connected to families that might need their help, although that's hard because they don't seem to have any idea how to actually help) The whole thing seems kind of poorly-conceived and peculiar, and I'm not sure I'd be totally comfortable donating vast amounts of money to these people based on this AP article or their website.

I would, however, very much like to own Jerry Garcia's kitchen table, where he ate his Frosted Mini-Wheats soaked overnight in a jug of homemade alcohol/pure LSD each morning, so I'll have to go post a bid. That's gonna be a kickass conversation starter.